Tuesday, October 20, 2009

New York Times Reporter: Cap-And-Trade For Babies?

" . . . probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."

It's long been a mantra on the left that people are a plague on the earth, ravaging its surface for food and resources, polluting its atmosphere and endangering its species. Now we are endangering its very climate to the point of extinction. Even the result of our breathing — carbon dioxide — has been declared by the EPA to be a dangerous pollutant.

Participating via Web cam, Revkin volunteered that in allocating carbon credits as part of any cap-and-trade scheme, "if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?"

"More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions," Rivkin has blogged, wondering "whether this means we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation." Save the trees, not the children.

Rivkin's views are unfortunately shared by people with power and influence. Jonathon Porritt, chairman of Britain's Sustainable Development Commission, believes that "having more than two children is irresponsible" and that people should "connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint."